2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This poster seeks to investigate undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of the resources that contribute to their belief that they can perform professional skills.

For many students, the goal of attending a 4-year undergraduate engineering program is justified by the idea that they will be able to gain the skills that will prepare and provide them with a job upon graduation. In order to get a job after earning a degree, employers don't only look for technical skills that come with the education, but also different professional skills such as communication and teamwork. This has led students to seek opportunities outside of the classroom in order to develop these sets of skills. While universities have the funding and resources to help students develop these skills, if they don't know what students think are important, they won't know where to direct their resources. This has led our work to be guided by the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students perceive the resources designed to support their development of professional skills?

We conducted focus groups with undergraduate engineering students at two R1 universities in the United States. In order to categorize emerging themes, we deductively coded the transcripts using Situated Expectancy Value Theory (SEVT), which is a motivational theory that outlines how perceptions are tied to students’ outcomes. The theory breaks down perceptions into utility value, attainment value, expectations for success, perceived costs, and interest/enjoyment value. When analyzing the data, this paper specifically looked at the expectations for success category and broke that down into two categories: how students intrinsically view expectations for success and how outside systems, such as resources from the university, support their development.

Using the data we identify what opportunities or resources universities provide and how these resources and opportunities have shaped students’ expectations for success. This allows us to begin to understand how these resources can be applied to the broader engineering systems or engineering education systems. In order for universities to support students effectively, they need to be able to direct their funding and create resources that students perceive as beneficial so that students will actually use them. After we understand how students view the current resources available to them, universities can create more effective support systems to help develop engineering students’ professional skills alongside their technical skills.